TankingTips.com

If you’ve been following this site for a while, you’ve no doubt heard me say/write about gearing yourself for an encounter. Another concept that isn’t discussed nearly enough is to actually spec for whatever the focus of your raid’s progression is at the time.

The Common Parts of an SSC spec

If you look over the 4 specs that follow, you’ll notice a number of common talents amongst all of them that make up the core of all the specs you’ll use in Serpentshrine Cavern. I’ve added a brief explanation to each talent selected to help give some insight behind what makes up a stable spec.

• Part 1: Global Cooldown
• Part 2: Non-global Cooldown

After reviewing just how we go about generating maximum threat, it’s time to take a look at Specs and Enchants.

The Threat Spec - 12/5/44

12/5/44 - It works out pretty amazing that every single point has a purpose to maximizing your threat. This isn’t to say that other specs shouldn’t be used. Just like gear, you should always spec for the encounter. However, if you are presented with a threat intensive fight at your level of progression absolutely nothing beats this spec.

Even before Patch 2.3 came out, it was clear that the Expertise Skill they described was going to be amazing for tanks.

Just how Amazing is it?

• 3.9423 Expertise Rating = 1 Expertise Skill = -0.25% Parry & -0.25% Dodge
• 7.8846 Expertise Rating = 2 Expertise Skill = -0.50% Parry & -0.50% Dodge

Basically, 2 Expertise Skill is like 1% to Hit for a Tank. So we can say 7.8846 Expertise Rating = 15.78 Hit Rating. Which makes Expertise almost exactly Twice as effective as Hit Rating for threat generation.

I’ll admit, at one point in time, I thought this was a must have talent. Partly this was because of the content I was doing, partly this was because of my level of gear at the time, but I was wrong. In fact, I was wrong about this talent in a lot of ways. So I’m going to spell it out for you so that you don’t have to be misguided too.

How I thought it worked

Reduces all spell damage by 6% in defensive stance.

…otherwise known as what happens when your 5 man teams are used to Improved Taunt.

Fact #1: You cannot hold Aggro

No matter how hard you try an equally geared, equally skilled dpser can pull aggro from you almost any time they want to.

Fact #2: People don’t care if they get Aggro

However, they do care if they die. In the majority of situations, you having aggro equals the dpser being alive, but make no mistake it is their life they care about.